A foolish consistency, though it may be the hob goblin of
little minds, is also the way to go for a writing career. This seems
particularly true when it comes to the short story. Perhaps it’s a choice based
on economics: you’ll only grab a reader for those few pages, and if you can
pull it off then, you might be wise to do it again and again. Some of the
greatest writers of short stories are all about this economy of scale: Raymond
Carver, John Cheever, John Updike, Alice Munro, George Saunders, Tobias Wolff, Charles
Baxter. I might even include Lydia Davis in this incomplete list, though I’d
add that her longer short stories never quite seem satisfying enough as short
stories. But she’s got her short pieces down to a science, consistently. With
these writers, you might see some formal playing around, but generally, not
much deviation from the guidelines that have succeeded before. You can
essentially take any one of their stories and it will offer a kind of template
in tone, style, length, subject matter, among whatever other qualities that
could be checked off, to their entire oeuvres. That these are the most beloved
and lauded of writers says something about consistency. What it also might say
about the marginalization of short stories, and their estimable writers who
have made their names generally under the purview of short stories, is
something else entirely.
The short story might be the most conservative of forms, in
this regard. David Foster Wallace was anything but consistent when it came to
the short story. He bridled at consistency, perhaps out of a need to challenge himself,
to avoid boredom, or just because he could. But he seems to have cared less for
the incremental rewards of the equivalent of little caffeine hits, and, as so
many are led to believe in the publishing industry these days are, too, that
short stories don’t sell, aren’t read, etcetera. Insert any number of
maligning/marginalizing epithets here. I would guess that for a lot of short
story writers, or writers in general, the onus is more on finding a habit that
fits, though for a writer of DFW’s caliber, consistency in formal qualities was
nothing to strive for. Consistency can be a lowest common denominator, but over
a career I would suspect it would feel stifling and eventually as rewarding as
sending out your dry cleaning.
***
The rewards of reading a short story might be like the
incremental hits one gets from any addiction, caffeine, a check of the inbox,
etc. In this way, the argument seems to be made for the popularity of shorter forms. They certainly become more facile to write, if only for the time required to produce them. And I’d venture in a very
curious suggestion, that this is where populist poetry and the short story are
converging, which is bound to make poetry less of a
ghetto, eventually more mainstream (and you can imagine how the capital P poets feel
about their territory being impugned upon!) Whenever poetry is popularized, you
can hear the traditionalists crying foul.
The form is ready made for the web.
This arrival of short forms has arisen with the internet and
the self publishing venues. Before, this niche might have been under the canopy
of poetry. In fact, some of these short prose pieces are difficult to define,
and might just as easily be thought new forms of poetry. (As I’ve written a
kind of poetry for years—I can’t even allow myself to call it straight up
poetry, though others have—I’ve taken to submitting these short prose pieces both
as prose and as poetry. Who is to say what they can or cannot be called?) The
purists or experts might claim there’s too much writing to wade through, and
the playing field has been leveled to a ground zero nuclear fallout zone. But
who knows? I’m sure it was easier to be a writer, and be recognized for it,
fifty or sixty years ago. Maybe this is about adaptation to technology.
I’ve gone through something of an evolution in my own work.
I never used to write these short pieces, other than to be convinced I was
writing poetry, and I’m not sure when I thought of it as a good idea. In some
way it’s easier when you have time constraints, but it’s also more difficult to pull off successfully, because you have to accomplish
that kind of frisson moment, perhaps even to call it a catharsis, within the
space of a paragraph. In the same way you might question whether your 3500 word
short story is working, you have to accomplish something--more often than not--enigmatic, in 2 or 300
words.
